Monday, November 9, 2009

I think this is a great idea, to allow the US population to vote, directly, on whether a bill should become law, instead of the indirect process we now use, trusting our congresspeople to vote on our behalf.

Everyone in the US knows how lobbyists, hired by corporations or other groups with lots of money, sway how our congresspeople vote by simply bribing them. It's a disgusting situation, yet, somehow we all complacently accept it as normal. I'm sure our founding fathers had no idea this would happen nor how much technology would advance.

Congress does other things, of course, like holding public hearings on important topics, etc., so I don't think it'll really be as simple as outright abolishing it.

Unfortunately it seems very unlikely that the US will ever switch to a direct democracy. But I for one would sure love to see it.

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About Me

Michael loves building software; he's been building search engines for more than a decade. In 1999 he co-founded iPhrase Technologies, a startup providing a user-centric enterprise search application, written primarily in Python and C. After IBM acquired iPhrase in 2005, Michael fell in love with Lucene, becoming a committer in 2006 and PMC member in 2008. Michael has remained an active committer, helping to push Lucene to new places in recent years. He's co-author of Lucene in Action, 2nd edition. In his spare time Michael enjoys building his own computers, writing software to control his house (mostly in Python), encoding videos and tinkering with all sorts of other things.